10 Raspberry Pi creations that show how amazing the tiny PC can be

Arcade cabinets, robots, wearable computers and more built by Pi hobbyists.

The Raspberry Pi, the $35 credit card-sized computer, has lived an interesting life despite being less than a year old. It has been used to teach programming and host servers, but above all it has provided a near-perfect platform for some of the most fun and interesting hobbyist projects in the computing world.

Arcade cabinets, computing clusters housed in LEGOs, musical instruments, robots, and wearable computers are just some of the uses Pi owners have found. It turns out you can do a lot with an ARM processor, GPU, a few ports and GPIO pins, and an operating system (typically Linux-based) loaded onto an SD card. Here are 10 of the coolest Raspberry Pi creations we've been able to find.

A Pi-powered arcade cabinet

Lots of people have installed gaming emulators on the Raspberry Pi—not as many have used it to build an entire arcade cabinet. One such brave soul named Darren J described his epic MAME project in a guest post on the official Raspberry Pi blog last month.

The Raspberry Pi arcade cabinet running Track and Field.

Darren loaded the MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) software onto a Raspberry Pi inside a coin-operated JAMMA cabinet. It wasn't easy. Darren had to replace the monitor and power supply unit (PSU), and get the inputs connecting the buttons and joysticks to the Pi working properly. For that, he got an I-PAC 2, a PC interface that supports 32 button and joystick inputs.

"I hadn’t seen any information on anyone using one with a Pi, but as it supposedly appeared as a standard USB keyboard to the host system, I thought it was worth a try," Darren wrote. "In addition, having screw terminals would make connecting all the buttons a breeze—it was a simple case of finding a pinout of the JAMMA edge connector and attaching the cables one at a time. With the addition of a powered USB hub, it was time to see if the Pi worked with the iPac 2. I needn’t have worried, it worked without any issues at all."

Darren and buddies played Track and Field on the cabinet, before he sold it on eBay for £258. The lucky winning bidder received a functioning game machine with two joysticks, three buttons per player, and two start buttons. It has a working coin mechanism, although it's not the cabinet of choice if you're looking to play every arcade game in existence.

"At present the range of games the Pi can play is limited—some need emulation that’s just beyond it and the sound is usually the first indicator that things are not going to go well, but for vintage games it’s working well, and is exactly what I planned for—no hard drives to worry about, and much lighter than a fragile PC," Darren wrote.

When Darren showed the finished cabinet to a friend, "he couldn’t believe such a small machine is capable of running the system at all, let alone as well as it does."

Looking for more Raspberry Pi arcade awesomeness? Check out this guy who built a fully functioning arcade cabinet so small it fits in the palm of your hand:

Smaller than a Game Boy.

And as we've written previously, a successfully funded Kickstarter project aims to ship arcade cabinets for the Raspberry Pi in kit form starting in February.

Raspberry Pi in the sky: Sending images from near space

One of Dave Akerman's hobbies is High Altitude Ballooning (HAB), which he explains involves the use of "standard weather balloons to put small payloads typically 100g-1kg into 'near space' at altitudes of around 30km or so, carrying a tracking device (so the balloon position is known throughout the flight) and usually some sensors (temperature, pressure etc) and often a video or stills camera storing to an SD card for later retrieval."

But why bother with "later retrieval" when you can send live images down to Earth during flight? That's what Akerman was able to do after buying a Raspberry Pi. "In almost all of my previous flights I used Arduino Mini Pro boards, and these are ideal—tiny, weigh almost nothing, simple and need very little power," the UK-based Akerman wrote in July. "I looked at the Pi and saw none of these desirable features! What I did see though was a USB port offering quick, easy and inexpensive access to a webcam, meaning that for the first time I could have live images (SSDV) sent down by my payload—something that hasn’t been done very often."

The Raspberry Pi's view from near space.

Dave Akerman

Akerman added heat sinks to protect the Pi, a Radiometrix NTX2 radio transmitter, GPS receiver, and a webcam, among other things. "The radio system has low bandwidth and with a typical flight lasting 2 hours or so we don’t have time to send large images, so there’s no point using the very best webcam and the highest resolution," Akerman wrote. "I settled on 432 x 240 pixels with 50% compression as a good compromise between quality and download speed. I measured the webcam current and it went from 50mA at idle to 250mA peak when taking a picture, hence the need to short out the USB fuse (140mA max). A simple shell script took a photo every 30 seconds, saving them on the SD card so that the tracker program could choose the 'best' image (largest jpeg!) for transmission."

The project went off pretty much without a hitch, and the Raspberry Pi was recovered intact.

Siri, open the garage door

Apple's Siri technology is designed for people to give orders to their phones. But it can also control additional devices with Siri Proxy, a proxy server that connects to the Siri service.

One enterprising Pi user revealed this month that he's using Siri to open and close his garage door, thanks to a Raspberry Pi hooked up to an automatic garage door system:

Yes, Siri is a man in the UK.

"This is my first real Raspberry Pi project—Siri Proxy running on the Raspberry Pi, along with wiringPi to access the Pi's GPIO pins and turn a relay on/off," a user calling himself "DarkTherapy" wrote in the Raspberry Pi forums. "The relay is then hooked up to my automatic garage door system. So, I have control of the door with Siri on my iPhone."

The system is set up to work only over Wi-Fi, but he says it "would be possible to use this over cellular with a VPN." After installing Siri Proxy and wiringPi, he modified the code in one of the example Ruby scripts that comes with Siri Proxy to include commands specific to his garage door setup.

That type of script can be modified to control all sorts of devices. "As you can see, the ruby script is basically calling 'system' commands to access wiringPi," DarkTherapy wrote. "Setting a GPIO pin as an output then setting it high for half a second then low again. You can have Siri call any command you can type in a terminal window, such as a passwordless SSH login to a remote pc to have it shut down or rebooted."

94 Reader Comments

Uh, glad people have been able to get their hands on one. I may have given up.

Also worth mentioning is the RaspBMC project, which puts XBMC on a Pi. It has a fairly active user base. I haven't had the chance to try it myself (lacking a damn Pi already), but the project maintainer is the same guy who brought us CrystalBuntu for the AppleTV 1.

Are these things still really difficult to find? One of the sites that sells them (Element14, fulfilled by newark.com) is filled with angry comments about how they're backordered by 6000 units and can't guarantee availability. Another site has a notice that says that units may be delayed by months.

I haven't done anything nearly this cool with my Pis, but I still think they're an awesome little device.

The only issue I've had with mine is I was using it as a Nagios server (for which it worked--excepting one issue--extraordinarily well) to monitor my shitball ISP's network.

The main hangup I've found is that it requires reboots, about every 5-7 days.

Still, for a lot of (most?) uses, not being able to amass a decade of uptime is hardly an issue. If I ever get around to it, I'm probably just going to cron a reboot daily. This may also no longer be an issue; I have first-run Pis, and I know there have been several hardware changes. (I don't mind; for $25, it's _still_ been a superb purchase.) I also haven't updated the Debian released for it in...um...a very long time.

Using Gnome Predict and the HAMLIB library I'm working on using mine as the controller for a portable Earth Station for tracking amateur satellites. Main issue now is that it's very slow when running VNC, so I was happy to see that hack of the Atrix lapdock.

Once I get it working I might try my hand at programming a simplified LCD and button UI to select a satellite, enter coordinates and display a countdown to AOS/LOS.

Are these things still really difficult to find? One of the sites that sells them (Element14, fulfilled by newark.com) is filled with angry comments about how they're backordered by 6000 units and can't guarantee availability. Another site has a notice that says that units may be delayed by months.

I got one from Element14 but it's one of those things where you have to time it just right. They occasionally get stock in, it sells out, and then it's a while before more comes in.

Its neat what people are able to do with these, though i suppose it falls into any realm of hobby. I can't see any use cases here that i'd really want though - certainly nothing that makes me want to go out and get a pi yet. Side note - the roomba thing I think you need an old model, at least with mine there's no service port on it that I've been able to find (wanted to change the sounds right when i got it...had to sufice tossing a tiny bluetooth speaker on it when i wanted to be goofy and have a DJ roomba....or a santa hat recently for holiDJroomba.

Are these things still really difficult to find? One of the sites that sells them (Element14, fulfilled by newark.com) is filled with angry comments about how they're backordered by 6000 units and can't guarantee availability. Another site has a notice that says that units may be delayed by months.

Yeah I ordered 2 from them a couple weeks ago, ( one for a present) and their site said they had 20 in stock, by the time the order processed it was backlogged and wouldn't ship until the end of January. So I canceled the order and bought two from an eBay store for 49.99 with free shipping, and no sales tax. Was only a few dollars more than the ones with shipping and tax, without the long wait time.

If you really want one, check on eBay.

I used them for Raspbmc, and it was a huge hit with family and friends. They all want to turn their TVs into smart TVs with the Pi now.

Are these things still really difficult to find? One of the sites that sells them (Element14, fulfilled by newark.com) is filled with angry comments about how they're backordered by 6000 units and can't guarantee availability. Another site has a notice that says that units may be delayed by months.

Yeah I ordered 2 from them a couple weeks ago, ( one for a present) and their site said they had 20 in stock, by the time the order processed it was backlogged and wouldn't ship until the end of January. So I canceled the order and bought two from an eBay store for 49.99 with free shipping, and no sales tax. Was only a few dollars more than the ones with shipping and tax, without the long wait time.

If you really want one, check on eBay.

I used them for Raspbmc, and it was a huge hit with family and friends. They all want to turn their TVs into smart TVs with the Pi now.

I probably ordered mine during that same "20 in stock" window as you did. Maybe I should be glad you cancelled your order, because mine was fulfilled the week before Christmas.

Finding them in stock online can be a challenge, but I'm pretty sure any Element14 discussion thread that claims they're backordered by 6000 units must be pretty far out of date at this point.

Are these things still really difficult to find? One of the sites that sells them (Element14, fulfilled by newark.com) is filled with angry comments about how they're backordered by 6000 units and can't guarantee availability. Another site has a notice that says that units may be delayed by months.

Yeah I ordered 2 from them a couple weeks ago, ( one for a present) and their site said they had 20 in stock, by the time the order processed it was backlogged and wouldn't ship until the end of January. So I canceled the order and bought two from an eBay store for 49.99 with free shipping, and no sales tax. Was only a few dollars more than the ones with shipping and tax, without the long wait time.

If you really want one, check on eBay.

I used them for Raspbmc, and it was a huge hit with family and friends. They all want to turn their TVs into smart TVs with the Pi now.

I probably ordered mine during that same "20 in stock" window as you did. Maybe I should be glad you cancelled your order, because mine was fulfilled the week before Christmas.

Finding them in stock online can be a challenge, but I'm pretty sure any Element14 discussion thread that claims they're backordered by 6000 units must be pretty far out of date at this point.

I didn't cancel my order until 2 (business) days before Xmas figuring I would just let them ship to me and use them for other projects, but ultimately decided to wait until I'm ready for them. Its cool you got yours though. You must have ordered before I did. Either way though, I'm not bitter towards Newark.com, the Pi is freakin awesome and I'm just happy to have one.

I wonder how economical using it for "supercomputing" or at least cluster computing is. Lets see, 192 watts, about 60 processors about as fast as a 300MHz Pentium 3, and as many 24Gflop GPUs. A modern desktop could draw that little power, I'm not sure how much faster or slower it would be than 60 300Mhz pentium 3s, anyone want to wager a guess? You can't do it on clock speed alone of course, but lets say that was one P3 processor running at 18Ghz instead assuming perfect linear scaling. A modern architecture would be much more efficient of course and the massive changes in architecture make it incomparable for most tasks, but that's still a pretty high total speed for 192 watts.

The GPU is easier, for raw floating point math you would have roughly 1400Gflops of performance. Not actually shabby, a modern GPU can get well over 3000Gflops by now, at similar power draw (about 170 watts for a GTX680 if I'm not mistaken) but that's without the whole rest of the system needed to support it, while the Pi gets to half that throughput in a completely self contained package.

I wonder how economical using it for "supercomputing" or at least cluster computing is.

I suspect the bigger value is as a teaching aid and possibly development platform since (I assume) it has the same basic characteristics as a "proper" 60 machine cluster, only slower and for a fraction of the price. So you can use it to teach the basics and try stuff out without taking up time on a full size cluster.

One of the trends I'm noticing in a bunch of these is the prevalence of Python in so many of these solutions; having chosen to learn python in the last year, it makes me happy to see this wide kind of usage.

I picked one of these up today (I'm lucky enough to live near a distributor who both allows local pickup and has them in stock). Played around with it a bit, got XBMC up and running and was happy to see that it played all the 720p files I tried without issue. So it'd be worthwhile as a cheap box to hook up to a TV and steam stuff from an NAS.

But my main interest in it is as a very beefy microcontroller rather than a very anemic HTPC. I recently did a persistence of vision project and was thinking about redoing it with higher resolution, more colors, and animation, and the pi is more than capable enough for something like that. The nicest thing for this particular application is the amount of storage for animation, it's hard to find micros with more than about 256k of flash. Someone's even got a FreeRTOS port up and running.

I wonder how economical using it for "supercomputing" or at least cluster computing is.

I suspect the bigger value is as a teaching aid and possibly development platform since (I assume) it has the same basic characteristics as a "proper" 60 machine cluster, only slower and for a fraction of the price. So you can use it to teach the basics and try stuff out without taking up time on a full size cluster.

That was my thought as well. Teaching something like mpi is much easier with a stack of actual nodes and a realistic (if annoying) amount of network latency. That each node is way slower than it would be in a real compute cluster might even be a good thing, since it makes the speedup more obvious. The one thing it's missing is the fun and games of having multiple cores per node but a limiting amount of memory; single-core nodes are slightly easier to plan for.

I just got one for Christmas, too. And it took more than a month during which there were no updates - so obviously that was a bit worrisome. But I'm really excited now, I waffled a bit, but at $35 it makes sense even just as a quicker option to dual booting linux (which I've always set up on my PCs only to ignore). And my son will soon be old enough to really learn on it.

I'm continually amazed at the irrational Raspberry Pi fan-dom, with stories like these of squeezing a square Pi into a round hole. It's positively insane...

Want an arcade cabinet? You can get a used PC for less than the cost of a Pi, the performance is vastly superior, and emulators already exist for practically EVERYTHING.

Want to hook a webcam up to a computer? You're doing it wrong! Old Android smartphones are absolutely IDEAL... Cheaper than a Pi, tiny, low power, built-in WiFi, USB, microSD, a better camera than even the best webcams, and apps in the market will do the whole job without any work from you. Also, Wifi+Ethernet PTZ cameras are low power and under $50, and vastly better suited to their designed purpose than a Pi and duct taped accessories.

For a media player, something like the DSM310 is under $50 at walmart, including remote, software, and Netflix support.

If those GPIO pins look interesting, Arudino probably has a better offering for you.

Are these things still really difficult to find? One of the sites that sells them (Element14, fulfilled by newark.com) is filled with angry comments about how they're backordered by 6000 units and can't guarantee availability. Another site has a notice that says that units may be delayed by months.

Perhaps you want look towards the Chinese Cubieboard? (They also have the store at Aliexpress)

I'm continually amazed at the irrational Raspberry Pi fan-dom, with stories like these of squeezing a square Pi into a round hole. It's positively insane...

Want an arcade cabinet? ....edit.......

For a media player, something like the DSM310 is under $50 at walmart, including remote, software, and Netflix support.

If those GPIO pins look interesting, Arudino probably has a better offering for you.

geez, fanbois exist for everything.

You're missing the point. The R-Pi was invented to facilitate teaching computer programming. The RPi fanbase are doing exactly what the device was designed to do, learning. At some level, none of the projects (RPi or Arduino) make sense on either an economic or utility basis but they are fun and approachable by interested people without tying up a lot of capital or time. Arduino projects are basically for the same purpose with a more hardware oriented approach. For kids just getting their chops in as programmers, python on a RPi is a "no-brainer". Even the most hardware-challenged 10 year-old can put the pieces together and be programming in a few minutes, something not easily done on an Arduino without a another PC, software and a JTAG or USB based programmer. Each architecture has its positive features.

One thing I find very intriguing about the RPi is that essentially 3 or 4 cellphone parts are powerful enough to network via the Internet and provide a 720p video signal with audio, no fuss at all.

I'm continually amazed at the irrational Raspberry Pi fan-dom, with stories like these of squeezing a square Pi into a round hole. It's positively insane...

Want an arcade cabinet? You can get a used PC for less than the cost of a Pi, the performance is vastly superior, and emulators already exist for practically EVERYTHING.

Want to hook a webcam up to a computer? You're doing it wrong! Old Android smartphones are absolutely IDEAL... Cheaper than a Pi, tiny, low power, built-in WiFi, USB, microSD, a better camera than even the best webcams, and apps in the market will do the whole job without any work from you. Also, Wifi+Ethernet PTZ cameras are low power and under $50, and vastly better suited to their designed purpose than a Pi and duct taped accessories.

For a media player, something like the DSM310 is under $50 at walmart, including remote, software, and Netflix support.

If those GPIO pins look interesting, Arudino probably has a better offering for you.

You may wish to dial down your amazement level a bit, or you will remain amazed for the rest of your life, and likely learn very little.

For the people who are doing these things, it's not about finding the most efficient ready-made product to do them with, it's about *doing it themselves*.

Did you ever use Meccano? You could have bought a better motorised crane, remote controlled car or whatever from the shop. But if you were a Meccano user, you wanted to *do it yourself*. And in doing so, you learnt things you wouldn't otherwise have known. And that was good, and interesting.

The same applied to writing your own games on a Sinclair Spectrum or whatever. The result may not have been in the same league as "Horace Goes Skiing", "Manic Miner" or whatever, but you *did it yourself*, and in doing so, you learnt things you wouldn't otherwise have known. And that was good, and interesting.

I truly don't know what's difficult to understand about this. Perhaps it helps to be an old fart like me, and to enjoy seeing people learning things.

Are these things still really difficult to find? One of the sites that sells them (Element14, fulfilled by newark.com) is filled with angry comments about how they're backordered by 6000 units and can't guarantee availability. Another site has a notice that says that units may be delayed by months.

I got one from Element14 but it's one of those things where you have to time it just right. They occasionally get stock in, it sells out, and then it's a while before more comes in.

I got mine from Element14 (Newark). Just happened to check and they had it in stock. I checked a few hours later and they were sold out again. Cases seem to be the same way, stock level changes daily.